The Particle That Looked Back

By Jivika Vikamshi

On some nights Mira wondered if the particles were watching her too. It sounded absurd but so did everything else that had lately started to feel true. It was past midnight on a Wednesday, though days had stopped meaning anything to her. The physics lab was officially closed for maintenance, but maintenance never applied to someone like Mira, the one with a late-stage grant and no life left to lose. A lone fluorescent tube above the kitchenette flickered- a long gasp of white, then two tired blinks. Mira stood barefoot on the cold tile floor, cradling a mug of instant coffee. Her colleague Rajan leaned against the counter next to her. No lab coats at this hour, just dark circles under their eyes and the faint smell of printer ink. Rajan emptied a crumpled sugar packet into his tea and stirred it with the back of a pen. Not laziness but ritual. Mira watched the sugar dissolve into spirals, a tiny whirlpool forming at the center of his cup like a miniature galaxy under the harsh light. She stared. The vortex in the tea rippled something loose in her chest a sudden, glassy catch of breath mid-inhale. Did it start swirling before I looked? Or did my looking make it swirl? The thought was absurd, yet Mira’s mind latched on. She was trained in quantum decoherence; she'd spent her early PhD years writing code to simulate wavefunction collapse. Observation is measurement. Measurement defines reality. She’d run those equations on particle-field interactions a thousand times. But that was theory- abstract math confined to whiteboards. This was a cup of tea in a quiet break room: tangible, warm, real. And yet.

Her gaze alone felt like it had weight. She tore her eyes away from the cup as the spiral slowed and stilled, leaving nothing but dark, undisturbed liquid. Surface tension unbroken. Rajan was watching her now, a faint crease of concern on his brow. “You good?” he asked softly. Mira blinked, realizing she’d been holding her breath. “Yeah. I... I’m fine,” she lied. She was not fine. Something in that moment had shifted, as if she’d glimpsed a hidden seam in reality. A memory bubbled up her grandmother, her Dadi, whispering a soothing Hindi phrase while coaxing a boiling pot of milk not to overflow. Mira could almost hear her voice, gentle and sing-song: Jo dekhta hai, wahi banata hai. The one who sees... creates. As a girl, Mira had dismissed it as one of Dadi’s old sayings- a quaint relic of old wisdom. She hadn’t thought about those words in years. But now that phrase resonated with startling clarity. Her grandmother had called it Drashta -the Seer. Maybe Dadi’s saying an ancient Upanishadic notion that the observer brings reality into being - was not superstition after all. Maybe it was a truth Mira had been too scientific to accept until tonight. It struck her suddenly what she’d studied in equations all her life, her grandmother had once sung over boiling milk. Quantum or cosmic, maybe truth spoke the same language.

Mira poured the rest of her coffee down the sink and walked back to her desk. She didn’t bother waking her computer; the monitors stayed dark except for a neon fractal screen saver bouncing on one. Mira sank into her chair and let the kaleidoscopic patterns play over her face and the piles of journals strewn across her desk. She thought of the unanswered text from her ex, left drifting in limbo. She thought of her mother’s voicemail from last week, blinking unheard on her phone. She thought of the sealed envelope with her latest blood test results, untouched on her kitchen counter for days. All these open waveforms in her life, unmeasured and undefined. Does love exist if no one’s observing it? Does fear? By refusing to look, had she kept those realities suspended- neither alive nor dead, just... unformed? Mira lifted her eyes and gazed across the dim lab. Rajan was back at his station, scribbling under the desk lamp, his tea forgotten. She watched his pen move furiously, then still as he paused to think, the curve of his shoulders hunched in concentration, the slight twitch of his left hand whenever an idea struck. They had worked side by side for three years -sharing data, deadlines, countless 2 A.M. coffees -yet she’d never truly seen him until now. To her, he had been a constant, reliable presence -almost like another piece of equipment humming in the background. But in this moment, Rajan was something else: a fellow soul with his own private universe of hopes and worries -a whole constellation of traits she had never noticed. As if sensing her attention, Rajan looked up. His eyes met hers across the room. In that split second, something crystalline passed between them -not romance, not exactly, but a startling intimacy. It was the weightless click of being seen and seeing back. Two observers collapsing each other’s loneliness. Two mirrors aligned just right, reflecting one another into existence. Mira felt heat flood her cheeks. She managed a small, genuine smile. Rajan’s eyes widened slightly in surprise, and he returned a shy half-smile before they both glanced away. The moment hung in the air like a particle caught in a beam of light - visible, dazzlingly real, and then it was gone. Mira’s heart drummed as she turned to her open notebook. Hands still trembling, she uncapped her pen and, beneath that day’s scrawled equations, she wrote: Observation is intimacy.

Reality is relational.

I exist because you looked back. She paused, then added one more word as if confiding a secret: Drashta. She stared at what she’d written -the Seer- letting its meaning settle into her bones. Dadi had known this truth all along. Mira closed her notebook. The lab felt different now, charged with a quiet wonder. In the stillness, the hum of the refrigerator and the buzz of the lamp were the only sounds. She picked up her phone and turned it over. The screen lit up with a notification: one new voicemail from Mom. Mira drew in a steady breath. It was time to listen, to observe what she’d avoided and let those suspended realities crystallize. With a final glance across the room- where Rajan was back to his notes, a silhouette at the edge of her vision -Mira pressed play. She was ready to hear her mother’s voice.

By Jivika Vikamshi